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Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

SUMMARYThis atlas is the second edition, revised with fresh information accumulatedover the years since its first publication in 1994. Inhabited regions in theworld are divided into 10 sections, authored or coauthored by 16 linguists. Eachsection consists of two main parts: a text and a number of full-page coloredmaps. These maps amount to 108 in total, with an index on the front endpaper andkey to map legends on the back endpaper. There is also an index to regional mapsin most sections. Furthermore, the language maps of each section are accompaniedwith two general maps: one outlining geographic features in terms of vegetatedareas and hot deserts and the other indicating population density. The atlas isappended with an extensive language index (pp. 375-397) and a general index (pp.398-400).

Introduction (pp. 1-3)R. E. Asher and Christopher Moseley's brief introduction precedes the sections,explaining the arrangement and aims of the atlas, the problem of languageboundaries, and changes to the cartography in this edition.

Section one: North America (pp. 5-44, including 9 language maps)Under the authorship of Lyle Campbell, Marianne Mithun, Mauricio Mixco, IvesGoddard and Victor Golla, this section covers indigenous languages of Canada,the mainland U.S. and the northern part of Mexico. The 322 known languages areclassified into 58 units; 29 units have become extinct. As Native Americanlanguages have lost much of their territory to European settlers, seven of themaps are plotted according to language distribution at the time of contact. Thecontemporary maps also feature a few major Indo-European languages. Otherimmigrant languages with a substantial number of speakers are mentioned in thetext with pie charts for seven metropolises in U.S. Native American languagesshown on the maps are designated with consecutive numbers throughout.

Latin America (pp. 45-46)Terrence Kaufman deals with autochthonous languages of Latin America, which ispresented in two separate sections. To facilitate his treatment of languagesspoken in this area, Kaufman makes general remarks here on useful terminologyfor linguistic units. The following key concepts are explained: language anddialect, language and genetic group, language area and emergent language,dialect chain and language complex.

Section two: Meso-America (pp. 47-57, including 2 language maps)As a well-defined cultural region, Meso-America consists of southern Mexico,Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.Two language maps are provided facing each other, one historical and the othercontemporary. The historical one, based on the situation at the time of contact,shows the approximate territory of 67 languages (alongside additional varietiesof some languages) native to this region. A few of them had disappeared beforethey were documented; a number of them have fallen into endangerment, even ifthey can be found on the contemporary map.

Section three: South America (pp. 59-93, including 12 language maps)With the help of Brent Berlin, Kaufman concentrates on languages spoken in SouthAmerica and the rest of Central America in this section. The 12 language mapsare divided into two sets: one historical and the other contemporary. A total of427 languages (and additional varieties of some) are plotted on the historicalset of maps at the time of contact. Like elsewhere in the Americas, some nativelanguages in this region have gone extinct. On the other hand, there are stilluncontacted languages spoken in the Amazonia, unparalleled anywhere in the newworld. Indigenous languages are indexed successively in the set of historicalmaps and their unique number is retained in the set of contemporary maps.

Section four: Australasia and the Pacific (pp. 95-155, including 21 language maps)Darrell Tryon provides detailed information on indigenous languages of theAustralasia and the Pacific region, which includes all islands on the PacificOcean, Australia and Madagascar. There is one historical map for thedistribution of 455 Aboriginal languages and dialects spoken in Australia at thetime of first European contact. The map for contemporary Australia, on the otherhand, demarcates only the area for surviving Aboriginal languages withoutspecifying the languages and their location; it also contains pie chartsindicating the top 20 community languages, the top 10 indigenous languages, andpercentages of languages spoken in the eight capital cities. Four language maps(in 6 pages) are devoted to Papua New Guinea, which boasts the highest densityof languages in the world. There is also a map for pidgins, creoles and linguafrancas. The text is appended with an extensive list for further reading (pp.122-126).

Section five: East and South-East Asia (pp. 157-208, including 6 language maps)David Bradley, with the lengthiest text, endeavors to illuminate the complexityof linguistic situation under the shadow of nationalism and obscure ethnicity inthe Far East region, where Mongolia (with contribution from Alan Sanders) isalso included. The section is chiefly organized around the following groupings:Sino-Tibetan (Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman), Mon-Khmer, Austro-Thai (Tak-Kadai,Austroneisan, Miao-Yao), Turkic, Manchu-Tungus and Mongolian languages.Languages of the northern part of the region, covering China, Mongolia andKoreas, are plotted in a single two-paged map. Yunnan and Taiwan are the onlyprovinces of China that receive a separate treatment in the language maps. Threemaps are devoted to mainland South-East Asia.

Section six: Southern Asia (pp. 209-228, including 4 language maps)R. E. Asher is responsible for the part of southern Asia between Iran andBangladesh (as the eastern most nation). Languages in this section are mainlypresented according to countries of the region. India is covered in three maps,being one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world.

Section seven: Northern Asia and Eastern Europe (pp. 229-256, including 8language maps)Languages in Bernard Comrie's contribution span across northern Asia and EasternEurope. Two main themes in the text are statistical information from thenational census and linguistic information on major, not necessarily indigenous,languages of the region. Alan Sanders also writes a section on the Mongolspeakers of Russia. The vast territory of Russia is divided and presented inthree maps. The other maps cover central Asia, the Caucasus, Turkey,southeastern Europe and eastern Europe, respectively.

Section eight: Western Europe (pp. 257-274, including 7 language maps)In this section J. Lachlan Mackenzie addresses all Indo-European languagesspoken in Europe other than Balto-Slavonic. The text is organized largely interms of 10 geographic areas. The language maps cover all these areas except forRomania. Regional dialects of English, German, Italian, Spanish and French, etc.are also indicated on the maps, though without demarcation.

Section nine: The Middle East and North Africa (pp. 275-298, including 4language maps)A. K. Irvine focuses on the Arabic-speaking region in the Middle East and NorthAfrica. At the dialectal level the linguistic diversity of the region isreflected in the language maps. Text discussion centers around Neo-Aramaicdialects, Hebrew, Arabic dialects, the Berber languages, languages of Sudan andlanguages of the Horn of Africa, with contribution from David Appleyard for thelatter two.

Section ten: Sub-Saharan Africa (pp. 299-374, including 35 language maps) Benji Wald tackles the wealth of languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa in thisfinal section of the atlas. After remarks on problems such as the issue oflanguage/dialect and naming of languages, the four major divisions of languagesin the region are discussed, i.e. Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Chadic.National/official languages and major languages with population figures arepresented according to countries; smaller languages are tabulated withpopulation figures and reference information to the maps. Five full maps aredevoted to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nigeria and Cameroon also appear infive maps, respectively. Individual maps are provided for Mozambique, Zambia,Angola, Ghana and Ivory Coast. Other maps typically contain two or three countries.

EVALUATIONThis atlas is undoubtedly a valuable reference work for those interested inlanguages of the world. This updated and augmented edition is highly recommendedfor collection in major libraries, be they academic or public. It is also hopedthat the editors, contributors and publisher will continue to produce anup-to-date edition regularly; especially desirable would be an atlas in digitalform with a zooming function capable of displaying more geographic informationsuch as city names optionally on the language map.

As suggested by the description above, the ten sections vary considerably in thelength of text and the number of language maps. While all sections providesociolinguistic and genetic information, this also varies from section tosection as languages of some regions are better studied and some countries, e.g.China, do not contain linguistic information on the national census. The lack ofinformation definitely confines our knowledge on languages spoken in certainparts of the world.

Regions famous for great linguistic diversity include, in alphabetic order:Africa, India, Papua New Guinea and South America (particularly Amazonia), whoserichness in languages is also reflected in the atlas. Africa has enjoyed a longhistory of linguistic studies, yielding a great deal of research results andpublication. Even though some African languages are still awaiting documentationand/or in-depth study, understanding on autochthonous languages of Africa isimpressively substantial, thanks to systematic studies in the well-establishedfield of African linguistics. To a lesser extent, hill languages of India andindigenous languages in Papua New Guinea and South America have also receivedgood attention from linguists over the world.

To the list of great linguistic diversity regions I would like to add China, aCinderella whose beauty would show only with further progress in linguisticresearch in the country. Given the classical problem of language/dialect,linguistic diversity has been downplayed and distorted not just in Chineselanguages, but also in other minority languages (cf. Bradley 2006). China is oneof the few regions where new languages completely unknown are likely to bediscovered, see Dai (2006) for languages recently discovered in China. Asknowledge on languages/dialects of China increases, it will then be possible toexamine linguistic features of typological interests such as the variousprototypes of tone systems (cf. Ding 2006) among languages in the Sinosphere (aconcept advanced in Matisoff 1991 to subsume languages with a Chinese-likeprofile regardless of their genetic affiliation).

Finally, a few typographic errors are found but they do not affect the overallquality of the atlas. I would like to make clarification on two points in thesection for East and South-East Asia. The first one pertains the terms 'Kham'and 'Khams'. The former designates a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in westernNepal, whereas the latter is generally regarded as a 'dialect' of Tibetan, aspointed out in the text. The language index in the appendix, however, hasconfused the two. As a result, the index for 'Khams' only supplies a map number;its occurrence in the text is merged with that of 'Kham'. In Map 51 both appearas 'Kham' in the key; the correct name for language #31 should be 'Khams'. Theomission of 's' from 'Khams' also occurs in the key for Map 46. Another pointconcerns the variety of Cantonese spoken in Macao, which belongs to the samedialectal group as Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong, not the Siyi/Seiyap group.Indeed, Macao Cantonese is so close to Hong Kong Cantonese that the two can beconsidered a single variety; native speakers of Cantonese cannot distinguish thetwo on the mere basis of linguistic features.

ABOUT THE REVIEWERPicus Sizhi Ding works at Macao Polytechnic Institute. He has general interestsin languages of China, the Far East and beyond. His interests are not confinedto the grammar of languages, but extend also to maintenance of languages andlinguistic diversity.